Four Suits
by Incanto
Summary: Post-FFVII, the Gold Saucer passes into the hands of a mysterious new proprietor. Yuffie wants a piece of the action, and enlists the reluctant aid of several ex-Turks; but what exactly is at stake, and how much can anyone afford to wager?
1. The Sea

Author's Note: _This is a sequel to my story _Like Turks_, in that it takes place in the world of that story, which was a FFVII prequel. This only changes a few things that should become apparent later, and you do **not** need to have read it! This story take place after FFVII, but before (and quite possibly in place of) Advent Children or any other sequel. Enjoy!_

_-Incanto_

* * *

><p>Every day at six in the morning when a rich ocean fog still hung on the cove, on the white chalk cliffs, and the sky was the color of the crushed dregs of fruit in a cocktail, a man picked his way down the beach to the water. He walked straight on until his shaved head, raw, sticky-looking in the paleness, vanished in the wine-colored water; but it reappeared several yards out, and he swam in big lazy circles, strong but listless, an old shark.<p>

Mideel locals called him _Le Soldat_, the Soldier. There were not many such locals left. The Lifestream had receded, leaving band on band of incandescent, intricately speckled rock, and strange mutant corals had grown, and hermit crabs the size of cats in vivid shades of purple and red could be observed shambling around with unfamiliar species of seaweed and anemone waving off their shells like pendants; the beauty of the tropical island had increased severalfold, but there was no one to enjoy it. The long-term effects of the mako exposure probably depended on where along the island you lived, where and how much you swam, what you ate. There were no scientists to study the phenomenon, no soldiers to forcibly evict any of the locals who'd decided to stay, grimly putting out their fishing boats every day as generations of their ancestors had before the invention of tourism.

_Le Soldat_'s big shoulders, it was said, made him look like a coffin from behind. He had nut-brown skin and wore the same pair of tight red swim trunks, it seemed, every day, and nothing else. He lay on the flat rocks to dry himself, and smoked fish that he caught himself with his hands in the ocean, many fish on one stick; but when you caught a glimpse of his eyes, that was the biggest shock. Small and weak, scared almost, hazel-colored and surrounded by crescents of smooth whiter skin, as if they'd been protected for many years by a mask. He brewed his own liquor in a salvaged barrel, from various mushrooms and fruits. It was rumored to be strong stuff. The birds and stray cats and hermit crabs wouldn't go near it, and from the cave where he slept—the village kids would sometimes dare each other, prodding with elbows, to creep along the precipice overhead—strong mechanical snores issued each night like clockwork.

The girl wore the bottom part of a floral print bikini, and a white shirt with three large buttons. Smug and sleek, she moved with a strong twitch to her walk and her hands behind her, fondling a big floppy sunhat. Her black hair glowed brighter than the white rock around her. She looked constantly about to topple off the cliff in a flash of sharp girlish elbows and knees and long bony shins, the diaphanous sunhat flapping behind her back like a pair of useless fairy wings; but there was a deceptive grace to her, a drunken boxer's stance, a coy flirtation with the laws of physics.

She looked down and saw _Le Soldat_, his long brown coffin shape disturbing the rocks further down the cliff. He lay motionless on his back. His eyes were shut. The girl stared. Although she was obviously young, and in spite of her audacious walk, there was a curious stony quality to her little face, and the tiny cluster of dark freckles on each cheek. A normal girl would have cringed, even run off screaming, seeing _Le Soldat_. Her face suggested a kinship with the man she was looking at.

She put two fingers in her mouth and whistled.

When he didn't stir—he might have been dead—she uncoiled the cords of the sunhat from around her slender hard-candy fingers, and glancing up at the huge expanse of blue-green sky and sea, let them slip through; the hat flared out, casting a saucer-shaped shadow on the sleeping man that grew bigger and bigger as it floated downward, riding the breeze in a way that seemed increasingly deliberate, until finally—as a smile touched the girl's lips—it settled perfectly over his face and he jolted up coughing.

"Aloha-hoy!" she called down. Her voice was not big but the circular walls of the cove made it echo.

_Le Soldat_ got up slowly on one elbow, peeling the hat off his face. He looked up at the girl. The noon sun behind her formed an ironic halo around her puckish devil face as she grinned.

He blinked, long and slow.

"Go away, little sister," he said, not ungently.

She stamped one bare foot on the hot flinty rock.

"Oh, come _on_! Aren't you at least a _little_ bit happy to see me!"

He shrugged.

"You look healthy…I'm happy you're alive. I guess. Now, please go and leave me alone."

"D-don't you at least want to know why I'm _here_? How I _found_ you and everything?"

"No. No…I don't want to know anything."

She glared down at him, twisting the bunch of her fingers behind her.

"At least give me my hat back."

"Come and get it."

She took a few trembling steps down onto sharper rocks. The man threw her hat in the air, and immediately a stronger wind seized and tugged it irrevocably out to sea, where it turned several frantic cartwheels until receding to such a distance that it became one of a thousand whitecaps and distant wheeling sea-birds.

"Oh! That is _so_ low, you are _such_ a huge jerk!"

He laughed. "Jerk, huh? You got soft. I remember you used to have a much dirtier mouth on you. But, I'm a jerk?" He yawned, and turned away, leaning on his shoulder, so that they both looked out to sea. "You come here and make me remember things. Who says I want to remember? Look at that."

He held out one hand, palm down, over the water.

"Umm. So, what?"

"I like that. Every day, it comes in. Every day, it goes out. I like that. It makes sense to me. Anything else, I don't want to know."

The girl turned away. Slowly, her left heel scratched up and down the back of her right calf. "You know," she muttered, "he said you'd be like this."

"Huh?"

"_He_ said. You know. Red."

"Red? I don't know any…" _Le Soldat_'s shoulders stiffened. "Oh. So he did, did he. Well, where is he? I guess he had better things to do.—He's alive?"

"Yeah. I mean, yeah, he is."

The shoulders relaxed.

"Okay."

"What, hasn't he been to see you? Even once?…Does he even know you live here?"

"Sister," said the man, with a faint chuckle, "you don't understand the first thing about men."

He leapt off the rock. There was a loud splash, then a silky rush of water as, far below, he pushed off, trailed by a long gently frothing wake.

"Oh, yeah?" she yelled after him. "I know one thing! You're all a bunch of big, dumb—stinking—_cowards_! But I can wait! I'll be here when you get back, don't worry! You'll listen to what I have to say…if it's the last thing you ever do…"

But as he grew further and further distant, and her voice grew fainter, she shivered; as if doubting there were anything really tethering him to the land, or to a human life; or his past to hers, or anyone's.


	2. Ice Dancing

AN: _I was browsing through my old FFVII save files in preparation for writing this, and looking back, I realized I used Yuffie almost every single time...every file is "Yuffie and the other guy" "...oh...there was the time with Yuffie and Barrett, the time with Yuffie and Cid...that was fun..."_

_Anyway, speaking of Cid, I nominate Bill Burr to play him in the movie._

_-Incanto_

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><p><strong>Five Days Earlier<strong>

Most mornings, ever since she had moved into the low-slung two-room apartment that had recently been constructed behind the Highwind residence, Yuffie awoke to loud tinny banging and cursing either from the garage, or the shack Cid had constructed as a makeshift hangar for whatever small aircraft he happened to be tinkering with at the moment (the ragged skeleton of the original Tiny Bronco having been donated to a Museum of The Planet they were always on the verge of opening). Only recently, waking up on her own in the soft hazy summer heat, she would hear his boots rustling outside and overhead—the apartment was a sunken half-basement—creeping down the concrete steps, followed by a knock on the door:

"Hey, uh…Yuffie."

He always pronounced it_ Yuh-fee_.

"What do you want, old-timer?"

They'd always said it, but it was becoming true. Flecks of gray were beginning to show on his sand-colored temples, and he wheezed when he came up the basement stairs.

"You got any of…those things?"

"Um, you'll have to help me out here. I'm a detective, not a mind-reader."

The stencil on the apartment door read _Kisaragi: Private Investigations_. It was as good a description as any of the services she offered, occasionally, to discerning clients, although she did relatively little old-fashioned snooping. Translator, diplomat, courier, might have been more accurate; a spot of mild espionage if she was extremely lucky.

"The things that we talked about."

"What's _that_?" she loudly. "You mean your cig—"

"Shh! Shh! Shiva's sake, keep it down. Okay you little bully, I'll pay…"

"Relax," swinging her legs off the bed, "I'm messing with ya. Step into my parlor, as the spider said to the fly…"

On the wall by her little wood-burning stove was a black-and-white photograph taken four years ago, in a refugee camp outside of what was left of Midgar. It caught her eye as she put on her robe. Ironically enough, Cid himself was not in it. There was Tifa in her long starchy apron, stained with the soup she had been ladling out all day; Barrett wearing a hardhat; and Red XIII, doing his best to look drawn-up and dignified and human in a way that made her chuckle when she saw at it. That had been, she reflected, why out of all the pictures she kept this one. It didn't represent the places, or even people she liked best, but it had stuck in her mind for some reason.

With a sigh and half-smile (or was it the other way around), she opened the door.

"_Omatase_!"

"Huh?" Cid, in a plain work-shirt and tan overalls, frowned down at her. "You lost me."

"It's Wu-Tai. Means sorry I kept ya waiting, you mean old doper, now _here_." She pressed the pack of cigarettes into his hand. They were the unlabeled, white-box kind that factories had churned out for inclusion in aid packages to areas of the planet ravaged by Meteor, by Weapon, by the year of disastrous weather patterns that had followed. "Blow the smoke up the chimney so it looks like I got a fire on," she told him, "it's what I did the first six months I lived here…"

The arrangement had been that Yuffie, never on the best terms with her own family, would look after the house while Cid and Shera lent their engineering know-how to the rebuilding effort in Midgar. Now the work was mostly done, he'd found it hard to dislodge the new tenant and finally had the apartment built at his own expense. Given his domestic troubles—some more serious than others—he'd found a third face around the house helped relieve tension, vary the days, much like a child who was old enough (almost) to fend for herself.

"Aw, _thank_s. I tell ya, kid, I can't live like this. I'm crackin' up, I swear. She wants me to quit the smokes _and_ lose weight? I tell her, it's like love n' marriage, you can't have one without the o-other. Look at this sack of crap," he smacked his belly. "Ten pounds since I, quote-unquote, _quit_."

"I aint gonna lie, grandpa, it's pretty disgusting. I honestly don't know what Sher' sees in you."

"Aw, I'll pitch you out on your ear, ya pint-sized ingrate. Have you got some matches or what?—Thanks. Oh, oh god, oh, I'm dying, that feels good."

* * *

><p>They sat out on the porch. A brutal heat wave had recently passed over, but it was still more pleasant in the shade. Rocket Town, even without its namesake towering over it, always had a vague unpleasant sense of being stifled or crushed, that was stronger than ever in summer; it was always more pleasant in the shade.<p>

"So," said Yuffie, looking at the distant marquee of a movie theater, "I guess they made another one of those stupid _Morning After_ movies."

"Huh? I don't watch movies."

"What do you mean you don't watch movies, everyone watches movies."

"Not me.—Anyway refresh my memory here."

"Y'know, like, in the first one they go to the Gold Saucer for their bachelor party or whatever, and get all drunk, then the _morning after_ they can't remember what happened? But I heard it's the same story as the first movie. Like, the exact same thing."

Cid's eyes narrowed as he stared out over the hot grass. "Maybe they wanted to make a serious movie about drinking."

"Oh—come on."

"Nah. I mean it. Cuz that's how it is in real life. You make the same chickenshit decision as last time, and you get the same thing you got the last time. People are dumb. They do the same things over and over expecting something different. Don't they say that's the definition of bein' crazy? Doing the same thing another time and expecting something different?—What did they think a movie called _The Morning After 2_ was gonna be about, ice dancing?"

She chuckled a little behind her hand.

"Anyway, I bet it aint no _Loveless_. I'm more of a theater guy."

"You went to the theater _once_.—Hey," she said, shoving him a little, "hey, d'you ever…do you ever, like…miss it?"

"Miss what?"

"You know. _Doing_ things."

"You kidding?" He snorted, then spit off the side of the porch. "I'll take another ten years of this before I put up with one more day of _that_. But…yeah. I do sometimes, to be honest." He got up, and stood there with his burly thumbs in the belt loops of his overalls, looking at the decaying iron skeleton of the launcher that flickered a bit through the heat-haze.

"Real things," Yuffie continued in a faint voice, an echo of her question, as if she hadn't heard his answer. She wrapped her arms around her knees. "Things that mattered."

"But the thing is," said Cid, his voice suddenly hoarse from the cigarette he'd just smoked, "it aint about just me anymore."

"Cid! That's…mature of you."

"I'm serious. I can't just go flyin' off…half-cocked. I got my better half to think about. Even if sometimes she makes me want to…—ah, forget it. But you. What's stopping you, you could take off tomorrow if you wanted. Book a cruise. Or, there's plenty of work to be done, if you're feeling civic-minded."

"Nice try. I know you want to clean out my room so you can put two half-stripped motorcycles down there that you never work on."

"Heh. Well, you aint getting any less sharp, I can see that. But, it makes me think, y'know? Sitting here, every day I used to sit here with my tea and there was that _thing_. That big, ugly fuckin' thing, laughing at me. Then one day, it wasn't there anymore."

"You mean one day you'll wake up and I won't be here, laughing at you?"

"One day none of us will be. Until then, better not waste any time."

* * *

><p>Going through the front door of the Highwind house was like entering a different home. The backyard, full of dead brittle grass, reeked of oil and sweat. The front room was cool and tidy, and the half-length lace curtains Shera had installed over the kitchen window fluttered gently as Yuffie walked in.<p>

"What is he up to back there?" Cid's wife's called from where she stood over the sink. "He's quiet, he worries me when he's quiet."

Although her voice still held the faint huskiness of a habitually shy person, she was much louder and franker now than the demure young technician who'd welcomed them into the same house four years ago—no, it would have been more than four years when they first met.

"Nothing, Mrs. Highwind, he's…painting something."

"Really? That man? He couldn't open a can of paint without busting his thumb and cursing about it. I lose my mind every day, Yuffie.—Promise me when it's _your_ turn, you will marry a nice, scrubbed young fellow. Somebody quiet…with manners."

"Please, Mrs. Highwind. I'm hardly the marrying kind."

"Really…what are you, twenty?"

"Twenty-two."

"Why, I don't remember _what_ I thought about all day when I was twenty-two. You have so much time, Yuffie. There's time for everything."

"I'll think about it."

"Oh, I'm sure you beat the boys off with a stick…"

"There might've been one or two," she said, leaning in the doorway, rocking absently on her heels, "but I hit 'em real hard. They didn't get up back up."

"Oh, you.—Ah! I nearly forgot. There was a letter for you in the mail, but no return address. It was the strangest thing. A secret admirer…?" Her last word was drowned as she blasted the dishes in the sink with water.

"You're kidding, who writes a letter with no return address. I bet it's some crank. Give it here."

"It's in the basket on the garage door."

Yuffie crossed the small room in a few steps, fished the letter out of the basket—felt something hard inside. Shook it out of the small white envelope, into her small white palm.

"Huh. That is super odd."

Shera had come to stand by her shoulder, drying her hands in a large blue towel. She peered nearsightedly.

"A playing card…?"

"No." Yuffie flexed the card between her forefinger and thumb, and it had none of a card's give, although it resembled the Ace of Diamonds. She flipped it over. A slender black line ran down the back side, closer to one edge than the other. "More like a credit card…" she said. "Or a key card for a hotel room."

"Nothing else in there? No letter?"

"Nuthin'."

"Ooh…it's exciting! Maybe it's a real mystery for you. The Case of the Card."

"Eh. More likely it's one of my friends trying to mess with me."

But really, she thought, what were the odds of that? All her so-called friends had better things to do these days. She thought, staring blankly into space, until Shera drew back, suddenly looking troubled. All at once Yuffie's had seemed to age, receding back into itself; or forward into time.

The picture. Red. Red XIII.

She remembered another, different, _Red_, and she shivered.

"I can't bother a bigwig like Cloud with this," she said, matter-of-factly.

"Oh, but I'm sure he'd be glad to…well—that is to say, if not him, then…?"

"Don't worry. I know a guy."


End file.
